Love valentines day and every day
Love is in the air … a bit clichéd, don’t you think? Although, the topic is pertinent given we have just had Valentine’s Day. Some people think Valentine’s Day is stupid whilst for others it becomes the pinnacle of when your love is expressed for the other person. Florists hike up the prices of flowers to over $60 a bunch or more and gift shops rub their hands together over the profits. Restaurants must have a table booked due to the demand and the prices of food increase half as much again.
On the other hand it’s a day when you can express your love for that important person in your life. It’s an opportunity to say you appreciate the other person. It can be a friend, sister or a colleague and means you wish them a good day filled with love and joy. What a wonderful thing to occur in this world so often filled with gloom and doom. Perhaps the skeptics of Valentine’s Day need to stop and look what is happening inside them when they rubbish such a wonderful opportunity to express heartfelt emotion – and that is just the point.
Why do we need opportunities to be made to express our love? Why do we wait for a birthday or Christmas or a special event to buy that card or gift, sign it and put our crosses for kisses and circles for hugs? In a world filled with war, poverty and sorrow why can’t we make each day special in some way for the people we love and work on expanding that love to communicate and get to know others so our circle of love becomes bigger?
Is it time to perhaps look at how our day’s start? Does your day start with the rush of screaming at the children to get ready for school, a quick kiss for your partner, half a mouthful of breakfast, swearing under your breathe at the traffic and then into a workplace of people who may as well be faceless because they are colleagues and you don’t really know them – you work with them.
Sometimes there is a night of passion with a partner, or a movie or a dinner out but when do we really take the time to stop and centre, meditate, gaze into each other’s eyes and say ‘I love you’ on a Monday night when the big meeting with the boss is …tomorrow!
So after dealing with the polite niceties of ‘hello, how are you’ to the customers at the office and often not waiting for a reply and the sign off of ‘have a nice day’ when you don’t even know how their day has been, we go home in the same monotonous traffic to hurry the children with the homework, cook the dinner, watch the TV and then fall in a clump into bed. Sometimes there is a night of passion with a partner, or a movie or a dinner out but when do we really take the time to stop and centre, meditate, gaze into each other’s eyes and say ‘I love you’ on a Monday night when the big meeting with the boss is …tomorrow!
So when it comes to love let’s not be so stingy. Let’s buy the chocolate heart, two dollar lollies at the service station when we pay for our petrol, the small pink bear next to it, the flower, that bracelet, the new wallet…whatever. It’s just a small token of our love here and there, for no reason. Not because it’s Christmas, or your birthday or even Valentine’s Day but because I love you and I appreciate you being in my life.
We don’t say it often enough and as we look back over the years the opportunities to say it have disappeared. So right now stop reading this, pick up the phone, turn to the person next to you and, in whichever way is appropriate, tell them you love them or that you appreciate and value having them in your life… and if you don’t then take a good look at yourself as to why. We can do nothing about other people, their moods, how they think or act but we can do something about how we feel and how we act and maybe, just maybe, if we all work on that, one morning we will wake up and instead of the guns of war echoing in some countries it will be the sound of joyful laughter, children playing and the smell of croissants and coffee awaiting us at a table served with love.
